Model Citizens: Ross Sawyers at Platform and Bill Finger at Punch

Never mind the fact that we are the helpless playthings of an indifferent universe – we can always build models. Models indulge our fantasies of control and desire, promising the potential of power over real-world counterparts; Voodoo dolls come to mind. The replicas themselves, when animated by skill or imagination, can offer an oddly satisfying illusion of life, fascinating both for how they do and do not resemble their full-sized subject.

Both Bill Finger and Ross Sawyers participate in the very grown-up sport of building and then photographing such scale models, and both of them achieve seriously interesting results, partly the result of their intentional blurring of the lines between the real and the merely constructed.

Both photographers are careful to include visual cues as to the illusion in progress, though their method for doing so is quite different. In the case of Sawyers, whose range of subject matter is much narrower and sense of the theatrical much more understated, it is a combination of little things, like the scale of the folds in the plastic wrap that appears in nearly every image, or the lack of depth in wall and window openings. Bill Finger, on the other hand, has in his most recent work chosen to pull his viewpoint far enough back to include a peek at the tabletop or wall space just beyond his construction, allowing us to recognize the artifice at work – but not without a bit of a shock, his models being so convincing.

Finger and Sawyers also start from different frames of reference: Sawyer includes literal quotes from artists like Edward Hopper and James Turrell, and is preoccupied with formal composition, and the poetics of emptiness and light; Finger, who worked in the film industry as an assistant cinemaphotographer, finds inspiration in both childhood memories and the world of Hollywood make-believe.

Many of the images in Sawyer’s show are in black and white, further adding to the austere, even minimalist look of his work. Sawyers’s field of inquiry is the unfurnished room, its bare walls and simple trim suggestive of modern, mass-market townhouses or apartments. Sawyers is interested in using the unpromising backdrop of these neutral spaces as a stage for quiet dramas of space, containment, shadow, and light. The human presence is implicit but remote; someone always seems to be moving in, or doing renovations, as most of the images contain some sort of plastic sheeting used to cover walls or windows, or protect portions of polished wooden floors or boxes. Patches of direct sun create patterns of light and shadow reminiscent of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and a clear, bright sky is always either visible or implied.

Edward Hopper is the direct source, in fact, of Sawyer’s image Untitled (Blue Sky I), a model of an empty corner office, seen from just outside the building. Sawyer has reversed the Hopper painting, and removed the rather anonymous office worker and his furniture, but he has preserved the architecture and viewpoint , as well as carefully reproducing the trademark chevron of angled light on the far wall. Like Hopper, Sawyers uses light as a stand-in for emotion and memory, and there is an artificial, stage set quality to Hopper’s office (stripped down in detail, rather than a fully-realized structure) that fits Sawyers’s program as well.

A more interesting artistic dialogue is between Sawyer and James Turrell, the master of light and space whose sky viewing room is a permanent feature of the Henry Art Gallery. In an earlier Henry show, Turrell constructed imaginary floating cubes in the upper corners of empty rooms using only shaped light. Sawyers mimics the same construction, but by the very different means of actually cutting away the upper wall and ceiling of his space to achieve the required shape, something that works here because his structure has no visible thickness. Sawyer’s phantom boxes, like his mysterious light and now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t plastic sheeting, gives these most prosaic spaces the quality of an enigma, highlighting the tension between perception and comprehension, creation and destruction.

If Sawyers’s frames are like stills from a moody, high concept art-house movie, Bill Finger works the much more populist territory of Film Noir. An astonishingly adept craftsman, his lovingly-detailed environments include genre-appropriate details like inch-long ashtrays, cigarette cartons and lighters, six-inch scuffed black office chairs and two-inch files folders. Nearly every image in his small exhibition might be another scene from the same movie. These include a hospital room; an interrogation room and an adjoining office; a bleak, windowless corridor; a leather armchair in a tenement bay window (seen from the outside at night); a close-up of what might be a crime scene; and a 50s Chevy half-submerged in a pond, a direct reference to Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The cinema connection is made even more explicit by Finger’s very smart decision to let us look slightly beyond his sets, where we catch glimpses of the tabletop, electric wires, cardboard, and even clothespins that are the mundane, real-scale underpinning of his work. It is fascinating how the magician explaining his tricks does not change our conviction that Finger’s spaces simply record real environments, no matter that he explicitly demonstrates otherwise.

In Hospital Room, for example, details like the institutional blue and beige color scheme, the look of the slightly bent-upwards single bed with its accompanying tray table, the fake-woodgrain wardrobe closets, the panic button, and the not-quite fully-functional venetian blinds inspires a familiar feeling of aversion and dread in the viewer. That is no less true even though Finger shows us the edge of the raw foamcore ceiling and walls, the worktable on which the model sits, and the space of his workroom beyond. -The antiseptic corridor Exit seems to smell of recently-applied floor polish, and the flocked walls and black fire door are just as despair-inducing as they would be if we were just leaving an elderly relative ensconced nearby, in spite of our clear view of the wooden struts outside holding the whole construction together.

Everyone knows the old saw about the Materialist debating the Idealist concerning the nature of objective reality. The tale ends with a challenge to the Idealist to leave the room via the wall instead of the door, thus proving that the room itself is simply a mental construct. In the models of Bill Finger and Ross Sawyers, the integrity of the wall is indeed a figment of our mutual imagination, but we are a willing participant in granting it a physical and real-world presence.